How can I find out information about DPT vaccine problems? I am vaccinating my 2 month old son next week and would like as much info on this as possible. What can you tell me?

A beautiful little girl was perfectly healthy until 3 days following her DPT injection when she developed a high fever, screaming, and convulsions. After the episode subsided, this little girl was left with permanent brain damage. Television specials featuring the tragic story of a child with severe neurologic damage following a DPT injection are a vivid warning to take new medical technologies seriously. However, these isolated tragedies are only part of the picture.

Throughout human history, infectious diseases have plagued the population year after year, causing measureless misery and death. This rampage had been virtually unchecked until the second half of the twentieth century, when a new process called immunization was introduced on a wide scale. This led to the global eradication of smallpox, the elimination of poliomyelitis from the Americas, and has almost eliminated tetanus, diphtheria, mumps, and the horrible congenital rubella syndrome. Immunization has greatly reduced the incidence of measles, pertussis, and meningitis. Millions of deaths and other tragedies have been prevented.

How do vaccines work?

Our bodies are designed with an intricate immune system to protect us from diseases. When possible, it is far better to work with the body's immune system, rather than to intervene with invasive procedures and toxic agents after a serious disease has already been contracted. The immune system has the amazing ability to learn. When someone is exposed to an illness and is not killed by it, the body actually learns from the experience. The next time it is exposed to the same illness, the body often recognizes the culprit and sets out to destroy it.

The concept behind immunization is to expose children to a very small, very safe bit of the most dangerous diseases that they are likely to encounter at some point in their lives. This mild exposure helps their immune systems learn to recognize these entities, so that if they are exposed to the full-blown diseases later in life, they will either not become infected or have much less serious infections. This is a preventive, natural way to deal with infectious diseases.

This is the concept behind the vaccination for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DPT). There are two forms of the DPT vaccine, DTwP and DTaP. DTwP (diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis) is cheaper and still used in the developing world. DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis) is newer, widely used in the United States, and generally regarded as safer. Both forms of the DPT vaccine protect children from three serious diseases: diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.

Diphtheria is a very serious bacterial disease that can make a person unable to breathe, cause paralysis, or even heart failure. About 10% of the people who get diphtheria die from it. Before the DPT vaccine was introduced, 17,000 children died in a single year in the United States alone in a diphtheria epidemic. In the 1990s, diphtheria spread across the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union and killed 3% to 23% of those affected by the disease (Red Book, 2009).